The Social Networker

Top 5 Marketing Tips

I’ve grown up with marketing, which since it’s what I do, is pretty lucky and it feels innate to me. Over time though it’s become clear that what I think is common sense, really isn’t common sense for a lot of people. So here are a few of the key tips I offer to those who have never done any marketing. These principles hold true across online and offline marketing.

1 – Know who your audience is.

If you don’t know who you want to talk to, you won’t be able to formulate your message to reach them. Who do you want to talk to?

2 – Know where your audience is!

Once you’ve identified your audience, you will need to ascertain where they are. For specific interests there is likely to be a print magazine you can reach them through, online you will need to check the various social media platforms to ensure you’re not wasting time on a platform that is not used by your target market.

3 – Add value!

An extension of the previous mantra of “content is king” is now, ADD VALUE. If all you do spam about your product or service, people will quickly lose interest. If you talk about trends, best practices and share your personality and sense of humour with people then you are adding value. Admittedly this is difficult if you don’t control the output, so print advertising is limited. Online however, you can, and in my opinion SHOULD, add value. You can blog about your industry and use that content across your platforms. If you have a printed brochure, use that to discuss the trends and republish blog posts – believe it or not, not everyone is online and some people still prefer to read a magazine.

4 – Do one platform well first.

It is tempting to go in all guns blazing across every channel you can. BUT, if you don’t already use them, how can you be sure you’re not being a prat and damaging your brand instead of building it? By all means go get your brand name accounts sorted and keep them as a placeholder but don’t start posting just yet.

You can sync a lot of the platforms to post to each other for you which makes life easier when you’re starting out and gives you the knowledge that even if you aren’t actively “working” each platform, at least you have a presence there and the message is consistent.

When you’ve mastered one platform and feel you don’t need to spend hours working on it, then start learning a new one. Don’t forget the first one though!

5 – It is not a monologue!

Marketing used to be about companies TELLING us things, telling us about offers, products, services, latest improvements and so on. Now it’s a two-way dialogue with our customers so make sure you interact with people and take feedback as an opportunity to improve.

If it all sounds too much and you’d like some help, drop me a message here and let’s see how I can help you.